Posts tagged with 'open source'

We are updating our Intellectual Property Rights Policy to clarify the relationship between this policy and the licences of the constituent works in Ubuntu. Specifically, we are adding a single clause which states:

“Ubuntu is an aggregate work of many works, each covered by their own licence(s). For the purposes of determining what you can do with specific works in Ubuntu, this policy should be read together with the licence(s) of the relevant packages. For the avoidance of doubt, where any other licence grants rights, this policy does not modify or reduce those rights under those licences.”

We are proud to choose the GPL as the default licence for the software that Canonical writes, and we do that because we believe it is the licence that creates the most freedoms for its users. We have always recognised those rights in this Policy, and over the course of a long conversation with the Free Software Foundation and others, we agreed to eliminate any doubt by adding this new language.

We would like to thank the Free Software Foundation and the Software Freedom Conservancy for their suggestions in this regard over the past year. We’ll continue to evolve our policies, in consultation with the very diverse groups that make up the open source community, to reflect best practice and the needs of Canonical and the Ubuntu community.

A buffer overflow in the virtual floppy disk controller of QEMU has been discovered. An attacker could use this issue to cause QEMU to crash or execute arbitrary code in the host’s QEMU process.

This issue is mitigated in a couple ways on Ubuntu when using libvirt to manage QEMU virtual machines, which includes OpenStack’s use of QEMU. The QEMU process in the host environment is owned by a special libvirt-qemu user which helps to limit access to resources in the host environment. Additionally, the QEMU process is confined by an AppArmor profile that significantly lessens the impact of a vulnerability such as VENOM by reducing the host environment’s attack surface.

For reference, the Ubuntu Security Notices website is the best place to find information on security updates and the affected supported releases of Ubuntu. Users can get notifications via email and RSS feeds from the USN site, as well as access the Ubuntu CVE Tracker.

Today marks 10 years of Ubuntu and the release of the 21st version. That is an incredible milestone and one which is worthy of reflection and celebration. I am fortunate enough to be spending the day at our devices sprint with 200+ of the folks that have helped make this possible. There are of course hundreds of others in Canonical and thousands in the community who have helped as well. The atmosphere here includes a lot of reminiscing about the early days and re-telling of the funny stories, and there is a palpable excitement in the air about the future. That same excitement was present at a Canonical Cloud Summit in Brussels last week.

The team here is closing in on shipping our first phone, marking a new era in Ubuntu’s history. There has been excellent work recently to close bugs and improve quality, and our partner BQ is as pleased with the results as we are. We are on the home stretch to this milestone, and are still on track to have Ubuntu phones in the market this year. Further, there is an impressive array of further announcements and phones lined up for 2015.

But of course that’s not all we do – the Ubuntu team and community continue to put out rock solid, high quality Ubuntu desktop releases like clockwork – the 21st of which will be released today. And with the same precision, our PC OEM team continues to make that great work available on a pre-installed basis on millions of PCs across hundreds of machine configurations. That’s an unparalleled achievement, and we really have changed the landscape of Linux and open source over the last decade. The impact of Ubuntu can be seen in countless ways – from the individuals, schools, and enterprises who now use Ubuntu; to proliferation of Codes of Conduct in open source communities; to the acceptance of faster (and near continuous) release cycles for operating systems; to the unique company/community collaboration that makes Ubuntu possible; to the vast number of developers who have now grown up with Ubuntu and in an open source world; to the many, many, many technical innovations to come out of Ubuntu, from single-CD installation in years past to the more recent work on image-based updates.

Ubuntu Server also sprang from our early desktop roots, and has now grown into the leading solution for scale out computing. Ubuntu and our suite of cloud products and services is the premier choice for any customer or partner looking to operate at scale, and it is indeed a “scale-out” world. From easy to consume Ubuntu images on public clouds; to managed cloud infrastructure via BootStack; to standard on-premise, self-managed clouds via Ubuntu OpenStack; to instant solutions delivered on any substrate via Juju, we are the leaders in a highly competitive, dynamic space. The agility, reliability and superior execution that have brought us to today’s milestone remains a critical competency for our cloud team. And as we release Ubuntu 14.10 today, which includes the latest OpenStack, new versions of our tooling such as MaaS and Juju, and initial versions of scale-out solutions for big data and Cloud Foundry, we build on a ten year history of “firsts”.

All Ubuntu releases seem to have their own personality, and Utopic is a fitting way to commemorate the realisation of a decade of vision, hard work and collaboration. We are poised on the edge of a very different decade in Canonical’s history, one in which we’ll carry forward the applicable successes and patterns, but will also forge a new path in the twin worlds of converged devices and scale-out computing. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the journey thus far. Now, on to Vivid and the next ten years!

The following is an update on Ubuntu’s response to the latest Internet emergency security issue, POODLE (CVE-2014-3566), in combination with an
SSLv3 downgrade vulnerability.

Vulnerability Summary

“SSL 3.0 is an obsolete and insecure protocol. While for most practical purposes it has been replaced by its successors TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1, and TLS 1.2, many TLS implementations remain backwards­ compatible with SSL 3.0 to interoperate with legacy systems in the interest of a smooth user experience. The protocol handshake provides for authenticated version negotiation, so normally the latest protocol version common to the client and the server will be used.” –https://www.openssl.org/~bodo/ssl-poodle.pdf

A vulnerability was discovered that affects the protocol negotiation between browsers and HTTP servers, where a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacker is able trigger a protocol downgrade (ie, force downgrade to SSLv3, CVE to be assigned). Additionally, a new attack was discovered against the CBC block cipher used in SSLv3 (POODLE, CVE-2014-3566). Because of this new weakness in the CBC block cipher and the known weaknesses in the RC4 stream cipher (both used with SSLv3), attackers who successfully downgrade the victim’s connection to SSLv3 can now exploit the weaknesses of these ciphers to ascertain the plaintext of portions of the connection through brute force attacks. For example, an attacker who is able to manipulate the encrypted connection is able to steal HTTP cookies. Note, the protocol downgrade vulnerability exists in web browsers and is not implemented in the ssl libraries. Therefore, the downgrade attack is currently known to exist only for HTTP.

OpenSSL will be updated to guard against illegal protocol negotiation downgrades (TLS_FALLBACK_SCSV). When the server and client are updated to use TLS_FALLBACK_SCSV, the protocol cannot be downgraded to below the highest protocol that is supported between the two (so if the client and the server both support TLS 1.2, SSLv3 cannot be used even if the server offers SSLv3).

The recommended course of action is ultimately for sites to disable SSLv3 on their servers, and for browsers to disable SSLv3 by default since the SSLv3 protocol is known to be broken. However, it will take time for sites to disable SSLv3, and some sites will choose not to, in order to support legacy browsers (eg, IE6). As a result, immediately disabling SSLv3 in Ubuntu in the openssl libraries, in servers or in browsers, will break sites that still rely on SSLv3.

Ubuntu’s Response:

Unfortunately, this issue cannot be addressed in a single USN because this is a vulnerability in a protocol, and the Internet must respond accordingly (ie SSLv3 must be disabled everywhere). Ubuntu’s response provides a path forward to transition users towards safe defaults:

Add TLS_FALLBACK_SCSV to openssl in a USN: In progress, upstream openssl is bundling this patch with other fixes that we will incorporate

Follow Google’s lead regarding chromium and chromium content api (as used in oxide):

Disable SSLv3 in the OpenSSL libraries at this time, so as not to break compatibility where it is needed

Disable SSLv3 in Apache, nginx, etc, so as not to break compatibility where it is needed

Preempt Google’s and Mozilla’s plans. The timing of their response is critical to giving sites an opportunity to migrate away from SSLv3 to minimize regressions

For more information on Ubuntu security notices that affect the current supported releases of Ubuntu, or to report a security vulnerability in an Ubuntu package, please visit http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/.

Net neutrality

Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication.

Internet Slowdown day

#InternetSlowdown day is in protest to the FCC’s plans to allow ISPs in America to offer “paid prioritization” of their traffic to certain companies.

If large companies were allowed to pay ISPs to prioritise their traffic, it would be much harder for competing companies to enter the market, effectively giving large corporations a greater monopoly.

I believe that internet service providers should conform to common carrier laws where the carrier is required to provide service to the general public without discrimination.

The social and business value of having a diverse workforce is welldocumented. Equally welldocumented is the relative lack of women in technology, and in open source.

At Canonical we are working hard to build a globally diverse workforce. We are well positioned to do so, particularly building on our open source roots, and in areas such as supporting geographic diversity we are quite successful. However, in terms of gender diversity, women make up only 13% of Canonical and, slightly more encouragingly, 18% of our managers. It is disappointing to me that despite having one of the most welcoming, collaborative, flexible and meritocratic environments I have known, we still have such a large gender disparity.

As a woman in technology and a CEO, I am aware of the power of positive examples. While we need to learn from and eliminate the discouragement, barriers and illegal behaviour which continues to haunt women in technology, we should also celebrate the possibilities, highlight the opportunities and help illuminate a path for others to follow. In that vein, I’d like to introduce you to a few of the amazing women in technical leadership roles in Canonical.

Alexis Bruemmer is the Engineering Manager for Canonical’s Juju team – a team of brilliant engineers working to make cloud orchestration easy, portable and flawless. Alexis has been working in Linux since her graduation in 2005 and is passionate about open source. Prior to Canonical, Alexis was at IBM’s Linux Technology Center. Beyond her work as a professional, she is active in the community promoting STEM outreach as Vice Chair for Saturday Academy and long time member of Society of Women Engineers.

Ara Pulido is the Hardware Certification Manager at Canonical, leading the team that defines and ensures the quality bar for desktops and laptops pre-installed with Ubuntu. She discovered Free Software at college, where she was a founding member of the local LUG back in 2002. She joined Canonical 6 years ago in the Ubuntu Engineering QA team. You can follow her at https://twitter.com/arapulido.

Leann Ogasawara is the Engineering Manager for our Kernel Team, following a series of promotions at Canonical from Kernel QA to Kernel Engineer to overall team manager. She has been involved in Linux and Open Source for over a decade. Before coming to Canonical in 2007, Leann was at the Open Source Development Labs.

Pat Gaughen is the Engineering Manager for the fabulous Ubuntu Server and Openstack Development team. She’s worked in Linux since 1999, and has been in love with Operating System internals for even longer. Prior to Canonical, Pat was at the IBM Linux Technology Center.

Roxanne Fan is the Quality Assurance Manager in our Devices Commercial Engineering team. She has been working in data mining for software quality improvement and automation tool development for the past 12 years. She wrote her Masters thesis on the performance of innovative routing for wireless sensor networks in the Ubuntu system. Before Canonical, she was at Pegatron Corp.

There are of course many reasons why women join and succeed at Canonical – great technology, inspirational colleagues, the opportunity to innovate, and to fundamentally have an impact on people’s mobile and cloud computing experiences. Some of the less visible yet fundamental characteristics of Canonical which allow women to succeed in leadership positions include:

A commitment to a respectful, collaborative, meritocratic environment sets the stage. One of the earliest manifestations of this commitment was encoded in the Ubuntu Code of Conduct. This clear statement of expectations has helped make the Ubuntu community a welcoming place for women, and applies in equal measure to Canonical.

Our recruitment philosophy of ‘hire only the best people’, largely unrestricted by geographical boundaries, provides us with the opportunity to grow and support a diverse workforce. It enables us to consider candidates of varying locations, economic circumstances, gender, and physical ability. Like all organisations we want the best person for the role, and leveraging our expertise in distributed, multi-cultural environments allows us to widen our recruiting net significantly. Across all Canonical companies, our staff is 30% UK, 32% US, and 38% rest of world. Those percentages are approximately the same when looking at all staff or management/leadership roles, thus providing excellent leadership opportunities in sometimes underserved markets.

We operate on a largely distributed environment and strive to support both home-based and office-based workers in equal measure. With 75% of our employees working remotely we have an extremely high trust environment, thereby empowering employees to integrate working life with home life. This approach has enabled us to retain men and women who otherwise may have left due to family demands.

I find the women above inspiring and am proud to work with them and many others of the same calibre. But we still have a long road to travel for our diversity figures to be where they should be. As with the root causes of the problem, the solution is multi-faceted and complex. We know that there is much more we can do to attract and retain greater diversity at Canonical, and are redoubling our efforts to do so. As a first step, come joinus!

Today is a big day for Ubuntu and a big day for cloud computing: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is released. Everyone involved with Ubuntu can’t help but be impressed and stirred about the significance of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

We are impressed because Ubuntu is gaining extensive traction outside of the tech luminaries such as Netflix, Snapchat and wider DevOP community; it is being adopted by mainstream enterprises such as BestBuy. Ubuntu is dominant in public cloud with typically 60% market share of Linux workloads in the major cloud providers such as Amazon, Azure and Joyent. Ubuntu Server also is the fastest growing platform for scale out web computing having overtaken CentOS some six months ago. So Ubuntu server is growing up and we are proud of what it has become. We are stirred up by how the adoption of Ubuntu, coupled with the adoption of cloud and scale out computing is set grow enormously as it fast becomes an ‘enterprise’ technology.

Recently 70% of CIOs stated that they are going to change their technology and sourcing relationships within the next two or three years. This is in large part due to their planned transition to cloud, be it on premise using technologies such as Ubuntu OpenStack, in a public cloud or, most commonly, using combinations of both. Since the beginning of Ubuntu Server we have been preparing for this time, the time when a wholesale technology infrastructure change occurs and Ubuntu 14.04 arrives just as the change is starting to accelerate beyond the early adopters and technology companies. Enterprises now moving parts of their infrastructure to cloud can choose the technology best suited for the job: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS:

Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS at a glance

Based on version 3.13 of the Linux kernel

Includes the Icehouse release of OpenStack

Both Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS and OpenStack are supported until April 2019

Includes MAAS for automated hardware provisioning

Includes Juju for fast service deployment of 100+ common scale out applications such as MongoDB, Hadoop, node.js, Cloudfoundry, LAMP stack and Elastic Search

Ceph Firefly support

Openvswitch 2.0.x

Docker included & Docker’s own repository now populated with official Ubuntu 14.04 images

50+ systems certified at launch from leading hardware vendors such as HP, Dell, IBM, Cisco and SeaMicro.

The advent of OpenStack, the switch to scale out computing and the move towards public cloud providers presents a perfect storm out of which Ubuntu is set to emerge the technology used ubiquitously for the next decade. That is why we are impressed and stirred by Ubuntu 14.04. We hope you are too. Download 14.04 LTS here

It is pretty well known that most of the OpenStack clouds running in production today are based on Ubuntu. Companies like Comcast, NTT, Deutsche Telekom, Bloomberg and HP all trust Ubuntu Server as the right platform to run OpenStack. A fair proportion of the Ubuntu OpenStack users out there also engage Canonical to provide them with technical support, not only for Ubuntu Server but OpenStack itself. Canonical provides full Enterprise class support for both Ubuntu and OpenStack and has been supporting some of the largest, most demanding customers and their OpenStack clouds since early 2011. This gives us a unique insight into what it takes to support a production OpenStack environment.

For example, in the period January 1st 2014 to end of March, Canonical processed hundreds of OpenStack support tickets averaging over 100 per month. During that time we closed 92 bugs whilst customers opened 99 new ones. These are bugs found by real customers running real clouds and we are pleased that they are brought to our attention, especially the hard ones as it helps makes OpenStack better for everyone.

The type of support tickets we see is interesting as core OpenStack itself only represents about 12% of the support traffic. The majority of problems arise between the interaction of OpenStack, the operating system and other infrastructure components – fibre channel drivers used by nova volume, or, QEMU/libvirt issues during upgrades for example. Fixing these problems requires deep expertise Ubuntu as well as OpenStack which is why customers choose Canonical to support them.

In my next post I’ll dig a little deeper into supporting OpenStack and how this contributes to the OpenStack ecosystem.

Two of the most frequently asked questions about Ubuntu and Canonical are:

* So, just how do you make money when Ubuntu is free?

and

* Ubuntu is great for developers, but is it really suitable for ‘enterprise use’?

We’re trying to do things differently, so we’re not surprised by these questions. What many people hear from other successful open source companies seems to narrow thinking about the value chain and open source economics.

So lets try and explain the answers to these questions, what we are doing and why Ubuntu has a model better suited for business in 2014 than that of legacy linux. Six years ago we made the decision to base our strategy for Ubuntu Server around cloud and scale out computing. We worked hard to make Ubuntu a great instance on Amazon EC2, which, at the time was just getting going. We created technologies such as Cloud-init to handle initialisations of a cloud image. We streamlined the base Ubuntu OS image to create a fast, lightweight base for users and developers to build upon. And very importantly, we doubled down on our model of releasing to a cadence (every six months) and giving developers access to the latest technologies quickly and easily.

The result? It worked. Ubiquity has spoken and Ubuntu is now the most popular operating system in cloud – it’s number one on AWS, the leading Linux on Azure, dominates DigitalOcean and is first choice on most other public clouds. Ubuntu is also w3tech’s web operating system of the year and the Linux platform showing the fastest growth for online infrastructure whilst most others are decline. In 2012 and 2013 we saw Ubuntu and Ubuntu OpenStack being chosen by large financial service organisations and global telcos for their infrastructure. Big name web scale innovators like Snapchat, Instagram, Uber, Quora, Hailo and Hipchat among others have all chosen Ubuntu as their standard infrastructure platform. We see Ubuntu leading the charge as the platform for software defined networking, scale out storage, platform as a service and OpenStack infrastructure. In fact, a recent OpenStack Foundation survey revealed that 55% respondents are running Ubuntu on OpenStack – over double that of its nearest competitor. If you measure success by adoption, then Ubuntu is certainly winning the market for next generation, scale out workloads.

However, many measure business success in monetary terms and as one industry pundit often reminds us, “a large percentage of a market that pays zero dollars is still zero dollars”. So, lets come back to the first question: How do you make money when your product is freely available? Ubiquity creates many opportunities for revenue. It can be from paid for, value added tools to help manage security and compliance for customers that care about those things. It can be from commercial agreements with cloud providers and it can be via the product being an optimised embedded component of a cloud solution being delivered by OEMs. Truth is, Canonical is pursuing all of the models above and we are doing well out of it.

As for Enterprise use, Enterprises are now really starting to understand that new, high tech companies are operating their IT infrastructure in radically different ways to them. Some high tech companies are able to scale to 1 Billion users 24x7x365 with less than 100 staff and frugal IT budgets and Enterprises crave some of that efficiency in their infrastructure. So whilst Ubuntu might not be suitable for use in an enterprise set on legacy Linux thinking, it is very much where forward thinking enterprises are headed to stay ahead of the game.

So, the basic values of of Ubuntu Server: freely available, provide developers access to the latest technology through a regular cadence of releases and optimise for cloud and scale out have been in place for years. Both adoption and revenue confirm it is the right strategy long term. Enterprises are evolving and starting to adopt Ubuntu and the model of restricting access to bits unless money is paid is now drawing to a close. Others are begrudgingly starting to accept this and trying to evolve their business models to compete with the momentum of Ubuntu.

We welcome it, after all, where is the fun in winning if you have no one to beat?

It is with great pride that we saw Ubuntu winning W3tech’s Operating System of the year award.

For those of us that work on Ubuntu, increased adoption is one of the most satisfying results of our work and is the best measure of the if we are doing the right thing or not. What is most significant about this though, as is highlighted above, this is the third year running that Ubuntu has won the award. The reasoning is fairly simple: the growth of Ubuntu as a platform for online infrastructure has far outstripped that of other operating systems.

In fact, over the last three years only two Linux operating systems showed any growth at all – Debian and Ubuntu, although Gentoo had some traction in 2013.

Ubuntu overtaking CentOS was the most significant change in 2013 and our popularity continues to grow whilst many other decline. Many of the notable web properties of 2013 are confirmed Ubuntu users: Snapchat, Uber, Instagram, Buzzfeed, Hailo, Netflix etc…Developers at fast thinking, innovative companies love Ubuntu for its flexibility and the ability to get the latest frameworks up and running quickly and easily on cloud on or bare metal.

As observers of the industry will know, tech used in Silicon Valley startups quickly filters through to more traditional Enterprises. With the launch of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in April, Ubuntu is set for continued greatness this year as more and more businesses seek the agility and innovation shown by many of the hot tech properties. It will be fun trying to make it happen too.

When it comes to using Linux on an enterprise server, Ubuntu is generally seen as the new challenger in a market dominated by established vendors specifically targeting enterprises. However, we are seeing signs that this is changing. The W3Techs data showing Ubuntu’s continued growth as a platform for online scale-out infrastructure is becoming well known, but a more recent highlight is a review published by Network World of five commercial Linux-based servers (note registration required to read the whole article).

The title of the review “Ubuntu impresses in Linux enterprise test” is encouraging right from the start, but what may surprise some readers are the areas in which the reviewers rated Ubuntu highly:

1. Transparency (Free and commercially supported versions are the same.)

This has long been a key part of Ubuntu and we are pleased that its value is gaining broader recognition. From an end user perspective this model has many benefits, primarily the zero migration cost of moving between an unsupported environment (say, in development) and a supported one (in production). With many organisations moving towards models of continuous deployment this can be extremely valuable.

2. Management tools

The reviewers seemed particularly impressed with the management tools that come with Ubuntu, supported with Ubuntu Advantage: Metal as a Service (MAAS), for rapid bare metal provisioning; Juju for service deployment and orchestration; and Landscape for monitoring, security and maintenance management. At Canonical we have invested significantly in these tools over the last few years, so it is good to know that the results have been well received.

Landscape Cloud Support

3. Cloud capability

The availability of cloud images that run on public clouds is called out as being valuable, as is the inclusion of OpenStack to be able to create an OpenStack Cloud. Cloud has been a key part of Ubuntu’s focus since 2008, when we started to create and publish images onto EC2. With the huge growth of Amazon and the more recent rapid adoption of OpenStack, having cloud support baked into Ubuntu and instantly available to end users is valuable.

4. Virtualisation support

It is sometimes thought that Ubuntu is not a great virtualisation platform, mainly because it is not really marketed as being one. The reality, as recognised by the Network World reviewers, is that Ubuntu has great hypervisor support. Like some other vendors we default to KVM for general server virtualisation, but when it comes to hypervisor support for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Ubuntu is far more hypervisor agnostic than many others, supporting not only KVM, but VMware ESXi, and Xen as well. Choice is a good thing.

Of course there are areas of Ubuntu that the reviewers believed to be weak – installation being the primary one. We’ll take this onboard and are confident that future releases will deliver an improved installation experience. There are areas that you could suggest are important to an enterprise that are not covered in the review – commercial application support being one – but the fact remains that viewed as a platform in its own right, with a vast array of open source applications available via Juju, Ubuntu seems to be on the right path. If it continues this way, soon it could well cease to be the challenger and become the leader.

UbuntuKylin was the talk of the conference. The UbuntuKylin project is a collaborative effort between CSIP,2 Canonical and NUDT.3 Initially released in April 2013, UbuntuKylin is an official Ubuntu flavour that will follow the Ubuntu six-monthly release cycle.

UbuntuKylin was awarded the Number 1 China Open Source Project for the year. Dr Qiu ShanQin, President of COPU, mentioned the establishment of the CCN as one of the most important achievements to Chinese Open Source Industry in 2013. Jack Yu of NUDT, Project Manager of UbuntuKylin project, was named in the 2013 Top 10 Open Source Outstanding People in China. Dr Wu QinBo, the Dean of NUDT Computer Research Lab, presented the UbuntuKylin project and its impact to Chinese Software industry to the audience.

Also at the event, Mark Shuttleworth delivered a keynote to introduce Ubuntu and Ubuntu Touch to attendees.

“May you live in interesting times.” This Chinese proverb probably resonates well with teams running OpenStack in production over the last 18 months. But, at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Ubuntu and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth demonstrated that life is going to get much less ‘interesting’ for people running OpenStack and that is a good thing.

OpenStack has come a long way in a short time. The OpenStack Summit event in April attracted 3000 attendees with pretty much every significant technology company represented.

Only 12 months ago, being able to install OpenStack in under a few hours was deemed to be an extraordinary feat. Since then deployment tools such as Juju have simplified the process and today very large companies such as AT&T, HP and Deutsche Telekom have been able to rapidly push OpenStack Clouds into production. This means the community has had to look into solving the next wave of problems – managing the cloud in production, upgrading OpenStack, upgrading the underlying infrastructure and applying security fixes – all without disrupting services running in the cloud.

With the majority of OpenStack clouds running on Ubuntu, Canonical has been uniquely positioned to work on this. We have spent 18 months building out Juju and Landscape, our service orchestration and systems management tools to solve these problems, and at the Summit, Mark Shuttleworth demonstrated just how far they have come. During a 30 min session, Mark performed kernel upgrades on a live running system without service interruption. He talked about the integrations and partnerships in place with VMWare, Microsoft and Inktank that mean these technologies can be incorporated into an OpenStack Cloud on Ubuntu with ease. This is is the kind of practicality that OpenStack users need and represents how OpenStack is growing up. It also makes OpenStack less “interesting” and far more adoptable by a typical user which is what OpenStack needs in order to continue its incredible growth. We at Canonical aim to be with it every step of the way.

In May 2012, Dell launched the OpenStack Cloud Reference Architecture using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on select PowerEdge-C series servers. Today’s announcement expands upon that offering by combining the benefits of Ubuntu Server Certification, Ubuntu Advantage enterprise support, and Dell Hardware ProSupport across the PowerEdge line.

Dell customers can now deploy with confidence when purchasing Dell PowerEdge servers with Dell Hardware ProSupport and Ubuntu Advantage. When these customers call into Dell, their service tag numbers will be entitled with ProSupport and Ubuntu Advantage, which will create a seamless support experience via the collaborative Dell and Canonical support and engineering relationship.

If you are interested in purchasing Ubuntu Advantage for your Dell PowerEdge servers, please contact the Dell Solutions team at Canonical. If your business is already using or thinking about using a supported Ubuntu Server infrastructure in your data-center then be sure to fill out the annual Ubuntu Server and Cloud Survey to provide additional feedback.

Today’s inauguration of Barack Obama to his second term provides a good opportunity to look back at last year’s campaign and appreciate it in a bit more detail. We’ll skip discussion of the adverts, polls, photo ops, sound bites, political theatre and even the much appreciated informed debate on the issues, and focus instead on the interesting stuff – the IT infrastructure that powers something as dynamic as a presidential campaign. You can imagine the demands placed on such an infrastructure – scalability, reliability, cost effectiveness, manageability, openness, cloud. Once you have those requirements in mind, the clear choice for meeting those demands is Ubuntu. And so it’s no surprise that the Obama campaign reached the same conclusion. We recently spoke with Harper Reed, the CTO of the Obama campaign, about the challenges he faced and solutions he and his team put in place during the campaign. We’ve published that piece in honour of today’s inauguration; you can find it on our new Insights blog.

You have critical decisions ahead as you take your first steps into cloud computing.

One of them will be whether to build a private cloud infrastructure in your own data centre, make use of one of the public cloud services offered by vendors like Amazon, Rackspace and HP, or combine the two in a ‘hybrid cloud’ approach.

You can get closer to the right decision by considering the right questions now:

Budget - How much do you have (or how much don’t you have) to support your cloud strategy?

Speed - When do you need this done? Tomorrow, next year, yesterday…

Demand - How many users will you need to support? And will they call come at once?

Resources - What kind of resources do you have in-house? And how many can you realistically get your hands on?

Privacy -How sensitive is your data? Where are you doing business?

This short, sharp checklist takes you through the process that points you in the right direction and ensures your investments pay off from the start. Download it today.

The open cloud, based on OpenStack, is fast becoming one of the most popular cloud platforms. OpenStack delivers open standards, modularity and scalability, and avoids vendor lock-in.

Join this webinar to find out why OpenStack is surging ahead, learn about the OpenStack technical architecture and the new features of the recent Folsom release. Find out why, to date, all public cloud providers, such as DreamHost and HP, whom are using OpenStack, are deploying it on ubuntu.

You will also learn about investments that Canonical has made into OpenStack such a as our Continuous Integration efforts, the Ubuntu Cloud Archive and Ceilometer.

Open-source software is increasingly at the heart of the biggest changes happening in enterprise computing all over the world. For me, open cloud is a perfect way to illustrate the benefits open source is bringing businesses and this is the major theme being discussed by some of the biggest names in the industry at the 2012 OpenStack APAC Conference in Beijing right now.

The business case for switching to or adopting cloud computing – and in particular, the open cloud – has never been stronger. Enterprises are realising reduced costs and increased flexibility without the risk of vendor lock-in. Open clouds let organisations move critical workloads to the cloud with the confidence that they can move from one vendor to another or onto a private cloud as they demand. This is because open source technology complies with established open standards.

As well as these business benefits, software like Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is helping devops massively reduce the complexity of cloud projects with deployment and service orchestration tools like Juju and MAAS. These sorts of technologies are streamlining the deployment process, making it quicker and simpler than ever to get applications running in the cloud.

The combination of Ubuntu and OpenStack has rapidly become the platform of choice for businesses building private cloud infrastructure.

The cloud is disrupting the enterprise computing world, driven by the growth of open-source software. As a result, new opportunities are emerging; it’s time to exploit them.

On the 30th October, Canonical will host an Ubuntu Enterprise Summit in Copenhagen. Industry analysts and enterprise users of Ubuntu and open source technologies, will join key figures from Canonical to discuss the opportunities these converging trends present.

The event is designed around three key topics

- How flexibility creates business value
- Choosing which bandwagon to board
- The way ahead, from client to cloud

With a keynotes from Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth and two streams of content – one aimed at business decision-makers and the other at enterprise technologists – it offers an essential briefing on delivering effective IT in a cloud-obsessed world.

These days, we spend more time online – working with docs, email, music and occasionally even accessing social media. But, our online and desktop experiences have been disjointed. We give applications the full run of our desktops, where they have their own icons and windows, but we trap the whole Internet inside one overworked application, the browser.

That’s why we’ve been working on a way to integrate the two worlds – something to make it just as easy to run a web application as a traditional app. And we’ve been working to give web applications access to the full range of desktop capabilities.

At OSCON today, Mark Shuttleworth revealed Ubuntu Web Apps, a new feature due to land in October’s Ubuntu 12.10 release. It will enable Ubuntu users to run online applications like Facebook, Twitter, Last.FM, Ebay and GMail direct from the desktop. Making web applications behave like their desktop counterparts improves the user experience dramatically; it’s faster and it reduces the proliferation of browser tabs and windows that can quickly make a desktop unmanageable.

The apps can even take advantage of Ubuntu’s new HUD system, making it even easier to navigate. So Web properties leap to the forefront of modern UI design, making for amazingly productive, fast and fluid applications on the desktop.

That makes Ubuntu the best platform for the web – secure, fast and lightweight. This new feature is part of our drive to make the web a first class part of Ubuntu. We’ve already turned 40 popular web sites into Ubuntu Web Apps and there are plenty more on the way. It’s easy to integrate your favourite website or interface natively into the desktop, and share the result with all Ubuntu users. No other OS has come close to this level of integration between the web and desktop.

To see it in action check out this video:

Some examples of what users can do with Ubuntu WebApps:

Launch online music site Last.FM directly from the Dash and control the music from Ubuntu’s sound menu

Access and launch your social media accounts (Google+, Twitter, Facebook) from the Launcher, and get native desktop notifications

Quickly and seamlessly upload photos to Facebook from Shotwell

Pause and play the video you are watching on Youtube

See how many unread messages you have in your GMail account, in Ubuntu’s messaging indicator

Ubuntu Web Apps will be available as a preview for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS soon and will be available by default in Ubuntu 12.10. I think we’ve made something that’s about to radically change users’ expectations of the web!